I’m sure I read this book as a kid and liked it, though by the time I picked it up as an adult I had forgotten just about everything about it, including the fact that it was illustrated by Edward Gorey. I’m glad I re-read it, because it’s really satisfying, right from the start. I love that when we are introduced to our protagonist, Lewis Barnavelt, he is wearing “purple corduroy trousers, the kind that go whip-whip when you walk” (p 3). Lewis is ten years old, on a bus, and nervous: his parents have recently died in a car accident, and he’s on his way to Michigan to live with his Uncle Jonathan. As it turns out, Lewis both does and doesn’t have things to be nervous about, but more on that later.
The house in which Jonathan lives is great: it’s a big old mansion that Lewis happily explores between his arrival and the time when school starts. I love how it’s described:
As for the house at 100 High Street, it was every bit as wonderful as the town, besides being strange and more than a little bit scary. There were lots of rooms to explore: third-best upstairs front parlors and second-best back bedrooms; linen closets and playrooms and just plain rooms. Some of these were empty and full of dust, but there were others that were crammed with antique furniture. There were marble-topped tables galore, and upholstered chairs on squeaky casters, and doilies pinned to the backs of the chairs, and stuffed partridges under glass bell jars. Each room had its own fireplace made of marble that looked—depending on the room—like blue cheese or fudge-ripple ice cream or green hand soap or milk chocolate. (p 24)
And Jonathan himself, it turns out, is a friendly guy, though he behaves a little strangely: his eyes glaze over whenever clocks strike, and he prowls through the house at night listening to the walls. Uncle Jonathan also has a great/hilarious/playful friendship with his next door neighbor, Mrs. Zimmermann: on Lewis’s first night there, they all play poker and the two grown-ups tease one another, sticking out their tongues and calling each other names: it’s fun, and perhaps a little disorienting for Lewis, to see these two adults acting, basically, like kids. But Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann aren’t just friends: they’re colleagues, in a way: he’s a warlock and she’s a witch—both are the friendly sort, not the evil kind. Which isn’t to say there isn’t evil in the story. The previous owner of the house where Jonathan lives was a warlock who got into black magic, and he left behind a mysterious clock that seems to be behind all the house’s walls, not just in one place.
I liked the magic in this story, and the suspense, and, most of all, the descriptive bits, like the passage above about the house, like this part of a scene where Lewis and his uncle and Mrs. Z can hear all sorts of noises under the ground: “Lewis put his ear to the damp earth, and he heard strange things. He heard the noise that earthworms make as they slowly inch along, breaking hard black clods with their blunt heads. He heard the secret inwound conversations of bulbs and roots, and the breathing of flowers” (p 58). I like, too, the playfulness and humor. After finishing it I checked at the library to see if any other books featuring Lewis Barnavelt were checked in: none were, but I now have The Figure in the Shadows and The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring on hold.
More/elsewhere:
- Bellairsia is a great website about all things John Bellairs; I especially loved the “annotations” section, with entries on everything from “vicy versy” to “Big Mac trousers” to “Weird Beard (insult)”. If you browse by book there are some broken/missing links; browsing by both book and letter seems like the way to go.
- Marilyn Stasio’s 1991 piece in the New York Times makes me smile from its first paragraph, in which Stasio writes: “I have just spent a long rainy weekend buried under a quilt, devouring salty peanuts and a stack of John Bellairs mysteries. It was heaven. Do I hafta get up from the couch and grow up?”
- Also in the New York Times, Natalie Babbitt reviewed this book rather more critically on July 8, 1973. The review is behind a pay wall on the NY Times site, but if your library has purchased the NY Times backfile through ProQuest, as the Brooklyn Public Library has, you may be able to access it through them. Babbitt says the book has “a great many good ingredients,” and also says that “Mr. Bellairs’s imagination, and his prose too, are refreshingly free of clichés.” But, she says, the way the story combines “sheer whimsical fantasy,” “realism with touches of tragedy,” and “classic horror” doesn’t quite work for her.
Leave a Reply